Throughout The Jane Austen Book Club I found myself wondering whatever happened to the "Women's Picture", that popular staple of the Hollywood cinema of the mid-20th century. They were directed, back in the pre-feminist bad old days, largely by men like George Cukor, Vincente Minnelli, Frank Borzage, Jean Negulesco, John Stahl and Douglas Sirk.

And they did the job nicely, in unashamedly tearjerking movies like Borzage's History Is Made At Night, or Imitation Of Life and Magnificent Obsession (both made by Stahl in the 1930s, then remade by Sirk 20 years later). And even avowedly masculine directors like Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh and Robert Aldrich made movies like Mildred Pierce, The Strawberry Blonde and Autumn Leaves.

If only they'd bring back the Women's Picture, the full-on three-hankie weepie, then perhaps we'd be shot of movies like A Walk To Remember, Message In A Bottle or The Notebook, which need no hankies, just barf-bags.

However, I realise that in order to replicate the Women's Picture precisely, one would have to turn all kinds of clocks back. Many of the great examples of the genre - Mildred Pierce, Stella Dallas - are predicated on such vanished phenomena as marriageability (pace Austen), unmarried pregnancy and the social stigma of divorce, in an era when it was that much harder for women to own property, get divorced, win alimony or child support, hold down jobs without enduring promotion-related sexual blackmail, and when a wife could still be institutionalised literally on her husband's say-so. Who wants all that back just for the sake of a few good movies about women?

Still, if only political advancement and greater opportunities for women - a defining social achievement of the 20th century - had resulted in better popular movies for the female half of the audience. Lately they haven't, unless you're a 15-year-old girl. Instead we get the cinematic equivalent of chick lit: the kind of sex-4-secretaries novels that the knackered pink-collar workforce nods off to on the Tube-ride home.

The Jane Austen Book Club's membership runs the gamut of stereotypical female characters who populate the degraded modern equivalent of the women's picture: earth mother; recently dumped chick; stylish snob-ette; single dog-breeder; dykey daughter, hippie grandma and frisky triple-divorcee. The same ladies can be seen en masse in such endurance-test, no-boys-allowed movies as Steel Magnolias, How To Make An American Quilt, My Best Friend's Wedding, Bridget Jones' Diary, and dozens of others. Have you ever met a single woman in real life who in any way resembles these colour-by-number ciphers? Me neither.